Tolstoy

To begin with, Tolstoy did not mind – he and Taneyev played a lot of chess together, and he certainly enjoyed the composer’s peerless performances of the classical repertoire of which he was so fond. Taneyev had been a pupil of Tchaikovsky and Nikolay Rubinstein, and in 1875, at the age of just nineteen, had been the first Moscow Conservatoire student to graduate with the Gold Medal in composition and performance. That year he had been the soloist in the premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and in 1878 replaced him as teacher at the Moscow Conservatoire (his many pupils would include Scriabin and Rachmaninov). Tolstoy even shared an enthusiasm for Esperanto with Taneyev, who was unusual in being one of Russia’s first speakers of the language – he wrote songs with lyrics in Esperanto, as well his frankly rather unexciting diary entries. Tolstoy had nothing but praise for Esperanto’s inventor Lazar Zamenhof and the book he published in 1887: Lingvo inter-nacia. Antaŭparolo kaj plena lernolibro (International Language. Foreword and Complete Textbook).

A native Russian speaker from Białystok in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, Zamenhof published under the pseudonym doktoro Esperanto (doctor Hopeful), a name which expressed his dream that Esperanto would bring peace and understanding between peoples all over the world. Tolstoy expressed his support for the language in a letter he wrote to some Esperanto enthusiasts in early 1894. He told them he had received Zamenhof’s book soon after it was published, and claimed to have learned to read the language fluently in two hours. This gave the resourceful Tolstoyans the idea of using the journal Esperantisto as an ideological platform. In May 1895 Esperantisto published translations of both Tolstoy’s 1894 letter and his article ‘On Reason in Religion’. The Russian government reacted by promptly banning any further imports of the journal from its editorial base in Nuremberg. By August Esperantisto was forced to close, since three-quarters of its 600 subscribers lived in Russia. Amongst them must have been Taneyev.⁴⁴

A shared love of Esperanto was unfortunately not sufficient to prevent Tolstoy developing absurd feelings of jealousy towards the hapless Taneyev, despite the fact that the composer was a confirmed bachelor. Taneyev was clearly extremely fond of his young pupil ‘Yusha’ Pomerantsev, who studied harmony and counterpoint with him for several years, and was frequently by his side, but the composer’s lifelong companion was his old nanny. As one former student later commented, Taneyev simultaneously experienced fear, respect and contempt towards ‘ladies’, their appearance at his home invariably throwing him off kilter and making him less ‘straightforward and natural’.⁴⁵

Taneyev’s ecstatic comments about bicycling, moreover (‘I think that even the experiences of newly-weds on their wedding night cannot compare with the sensations experienced by a bicyclist’), ought to have been enough to put Tolstoy’s mind at rest.⁴⁶ Some might even argue that Tolstoy should have been indulgent of his wife simply for sitting through the premiere of Taneyev’s interminably long opera The Oresteia at the Mariinsky Theatre in October 1895 (which rapidly disappeared from the repertoire after he refused to cut it).

Taneyev was hardly a surrogate husband, more someone for Sonya to talk to, particularly about the day-to-day matters concerning life at Yasnaya Polyana which Tolstoy had washed his hands of years before. Tolstoy might have been magnanimous, even if he did think his wife was making a fool of herself by fawning on a man much younger than herself. After all, he was doing the same now that Chertkov had replaced her as the chief object of his affections and confidences. Later on, Sonya would actually accuse her husband of having a homosexual relationship with Chertkov.⁴⁷ It is a charge that cannot be substantiated, although the tone of many of Tolstoy’s letters to his younger friend just after he was deported to England is sometimes that of an infatuated adolescent, and his affection was at least reciprocated with an obsessive devotion on Chertkov’s part.⁴⁸